Tutorials & Workshops

All tutorials and workshops run on Monday, March 6, 2017. Tutorial/Workshop websites are hosted externally. Please, click on the Title to see details about each tutorial/workshop (links will be added as soon as they become available).

Room: “Rote Bar”

Organizers:

Ester Martinez-Martin, Angel P. del Pobil

Abstract:

The paradigm shift of Robotics moving toward autonomous robots meeting human needs in real world settings requires developing robot interaction skills. So, a synergy of different disciplines is essential to achieve that goal. In particular, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), the study of how humans interact with robots in daily environments, aims to endow robots with the necessary interactive abilities. So, the first stage is efficient people detection and tracking. In this sense, vision plays a main role due to the information it can provide. Despite the wide research on this topic, robot applications require a trade-off between efficiency and runtime. For that reason, it is necessary to design visual systems to efficiently detect and track people in real scenarios, but without culminating in a time-consumption process. In this context, motion plays a main role because it provides a stimulus for detecting moving elements (e.g. people) in the observed scene. Moreover, motion allows to obtain other characteristics such as, for instance, object shape, speed or trajectory, which are meaningful for detection and recognition. Nevertheless, the motion observable in a visual input could be due to different factors: (partial or total) occlusions, movement of the imaged objects (targets and/or vacillating background elements), movement of the observer, variable illumination or motion of the light sources, or a combination of them. Therefore, image analysis for motion detection will be contingent upon the considered factors. Therefore, the purpose of this tutorial is to make the attendee aware of the problems to be overcome for robust human detection and tracking as well as the existing methods. It will be partially based on our book Robust Motion Detection in Real-Life Scenarios, Springer, 2012.

Room: “Science Cafe”

Organizers:

Serge Thill, Tom Ziemke

Abstract:

The present workshop focuses on the role of intentions in HRI. To be able to recognise intentions of other agents is a fundamental prerequisite to engage in, for instance, instrumental helping or mutual collaboration. It is a necessary aspect of natural interaction. In HRI, the problem is therefore bi-directional: not only does a robot need the ability to infer intentions of humans; humans also need to infer the intentions of the robot. From the human perspective, this inference draws both on the ability to attribute cognitive states to lifeless shapes, and the ability to understand actions of other agents through, for instance, embodied processes or internal simulations (i.e the human ability to form a theory of mind of other agents). How precisely, and to what degree these mechanisms are at work when interacting with social artificial agents remains unknown. From the robotic perspective, this lack of understanding of mechanisms underlying human abilities pertaining to intention communication/recognition, or the capacity for theory of mind in general, is also challenging: the solution can, for instance, not simply be to make autonomous systems work “just like” humans by copying the biological solution and implementing some technological equivalent. It is therefore important to be clear about the theoretical framework(s) and inherent assumptions underlying technological implementations related to mutual intention. This remains very much an active research area in which further development is necessary. The core purpose of this workshop is thus to contribute to – and advance the state of the art in – this area.

Workshop 2: Privacy-Sensitive Robotics

Room: “Pressezimmer”

Organizers:

Matthew Rueben, Bill Smart, Cindy Grimm, Maya Cakmak

Abstract:

As robots start to enter our everyday lives, they will bring with them the risk of privacy invasions. Unlike videoconferencing, we might not have control of where the sensors on our robots look, and where the robots go. They might operating in or homes and offices while we are not there, opening the door to an invasion of our privacy that no previous technology has been capable of. How do people think about privacy in terms of robots? Are they worried about their privacy being violated and, if so, in what ways? How does the law view the issues around privacy and robotics? What are the pressing questions that we need to address now, before it’s too late. This workshop will bring together researchers from a wide variety of communities to look at these questions, identify others, and help define the new area of Privacy-Sensitive Robotics. The workshop will result in a white paper that defines the pressing issues in Privacy-Sensitive Robotics, from a variety of perspectives, and will suggest a research agenda to address these problems.

Room: “Hinterbühne”

Organizers:

Abstract:

An increasing amount of HRI research focuses on the development of social robots acting as tutors. While robots have been popular as a focus for STEM teaching (see Lego Mindstorms or Thymio), the use of robots as tutors is novel. The field of HRI has started reporting on how to make effective robot tutors and how to measure their efficacy. These studies have shown that the potential of robots in educational settings is inarguable: robot can provide educational content tailored to the individual, something which is missing from current educational settings. They also have the potential to enhance learning via kinesthetic interaction, can improve the learner’s self-esteem and can provide empathic feedback. Finally, robots have been shown to engage the learner, to motivate her in the learning task or to enhance collaboration in a group. However, many questions still remain. For instance, what interaction strategies aid learning, and which hamper learning? How can we deal with the current technical limitations of robots? How should effective lessons be developed and implemented on a robot? Answering these and other questions requires a multidisciplinary effort, including contributions from pedagogy, developmental psychology, (computational) linguistics, artificial intelligence and HRI, among others. The aim of this workshop is to engage scholars who aim to gain expertise in education and in robotics (from instructional design to inverse kinematics, ROS to ZPD, Markov to Piaget) into a new interdisciplinary community working on educational robotics. Participants will benefit from hearing from the forefront of field and from discussions on how to move from fundamental research towards the development of market-ready educational robots.

Room: “Kleine Mani”

Organisers:

Abstract:

This workshop aims at advancing the topic of the relationships between robotics science and experiments in HRI. The full-day workshop follows on previous events in interdisciplinary venues (ICRA’13, HRI’14, IROS’14-’15, ERF‘15-’16) focusing on efforts to establish reproducible, standardized experiments in order to adequately benchmark and evaluate human-robot interaction, scientific achievements and results in the areas of industrial, medical, social, service and personal-care robots. The words “standard” and “standardized” sometimes are misunderstood as fixing and blocking the freedom of the researcher to create new experiments and therefore to advance the scientific knowledge. As per this workshop, the words must be intended as a “way of experimenting temporarily agreed by the community, that is evolving and tracking the scientific progress through continuous revision by the community itself”. The current metrics, scenario settings, corpora and databases applied in HRI experiments are tailored to individual cases and, thus, are not suitable to compare and benchmark results across laboratories and systems. The robotics scientific community should agree on processes, procedures and metrics in order to establish a standardized benchmarking platform that is widely applicable across all areas of robotics. This workshop will bring together research scientists, representatives of robotics companies and members of standardization working groups. We expect that a fruitful discussion in the definition of experimental scenarios and protocols in HRI will assist to highlight the latest advances in the field and lead to the development of agreed and shared evaluation platforms for objective benchmarking of the wide and ever-growing range of robot applications.

Room: “Große Mani”

Organizers:

Abstract:

Robots are becoming part of children’s care, entertainment, education, social assistance and therapy. A steadily growing body of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research shows that child-robot interaction (CRI) holds promises to support children’s development in novel ways. However, research has shown that technologies that do not take into account children’s needs, abilities, interests, and developmental characteristics may have a limited or even negative impact on their physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and moral development. As a result, robotic technology that aims to support children via means of social interaction has to take the developmental perspective into consideration. With this full-day workshop (the third of a successful series of workshops focusing on various aspects of CRI research), we aim to bring together researchers to discuss how a developmental perspective plays a role for smart and natural interaction between robots and children. We invite participants to share their experiences on the challenges of taking the developmental perspective in CRI, such as long-term sustained interactions in the wild, involving children and other stakeholders in the design process and more. Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we hope to stimulate thought-provoking discussions on epistemology, methods, approaches, techniques, interaction scenarios and design principles focused on supporting children’s development through interaction with robotic technology.

Room: “Rote Bar”

Organizers:

Momotaz Begum, Selma Sabanovic

Abstract:

Over the past decade socially assistive robots (SAR) have shown great promises to be used in healthcare domain for improving the quality of lives of elderly and people with various physical and cognitive disabilities. Despite their promises, such robots are barely seen in the real world serving people in need (Paro is probably the only SAR that has actually been used in various clinical settings). A growing opinion explaining this gap is that the health-care oriented research on SARs is less concerned about proving the utility of robotics systems and hence fails to meet the ultimate goal of deployment in clinical settings. SARs are application oriented technologies and, therefore, their deployment in clinical settings will not be possible until they can prove their utility. The robotics community, however, believes that, in many cases, technologies are not ready yet to support the deployment of SARs in clinical settings. The goal of this workshop is to bring robotics and clinical researchers together in order to establish an understanding of and approaches to mitigate the issues that are slowing down clinically meaningful advancements of SARs. In this workshop, we particularly want to focus on issues related to data collection and sharing that would enable more speedy research and evaluation in the SARs community.